The proposed project will involve the analysis of a secondary data set from the Study of the Virginia Nursing Home Pre-Admission Screening Program. The study includes interviews at two points in time (6 months apart) with over three hundred respondents who were either admitted to nursing homes or were cared for in community settings. The proposed project is a comprehensive statistical analysis of the factors which explain perception of personal control, changes in personal control over time (pre- and post-institutionalization), and the relationship between personal control and other variables, such as health, ADL, role in the institutional decisionmaking process, level of family contact and support, and life satisfaction. Comparisons will be drawn among subsamples of respondents who were admitted to nursing homes, those who applied for nursing home care but remained in the community as a result of pre-admission screening, and those who were physically or mentally impaired but did not apply or become placed in a nursing home. Multiple repression analysis and cross-lagged panel analysis will be used to account for perception of personal control when regressed on various independent variables. Regression models will be developed in order to find the best combinations of explanatory variables, i.e., maximize the explained variance in personal control at the first and second points of measurement.